But
as the physical and technological structures for omnichannel
collaboration have spread, evidence suggests they are producing
behaviors at odds with designers’ expectations and business managers’
desires. In a number of workplaces we have observed for research
projects or consulting assignments, those structures have produced less
interaction—or less meaningful interaction—not more.
In
this article we discuss those unintended consequences and provide
guidance on conducting experiments to uncover how your employees really
interact. That will help you equip them with the spaces and technologies
that best support their needs.
The Architecture and the Anatomy of Collaboration
Workers
are surrounded by a physical architecture: individual offices,
cubicles, or open seating; a single floor, multiple floors, or multiple
buildings; a dedicated space for the organization, a space shared with
other companies, or a home office. That physical architecture is paired
with a digital architecture: email, enterprise social media, mobile
messaging, and so forth.
But although knowledge workers are influenced by this architecture, they
decide, individually and collectively, when to interact. Even in open
spaces with colleagues in close proximity, people who want to eschew
interactions have an amazing capacity to do so. They avoid eye contact,
discover an immediate need to use the bathroom or take a walk, or become
so engrossed in their tasks that they are selectively deaf (perhaps
with the help of headphones). Ironically, the proliferation of ways to
interact makes it easier not to respond: For example, workers can simply ignore a digital message.
When
employees do want to interact, they choose the channel: face-to-face,
video conference, phone, social media, email, messaging, and so on.
Someone initiating an exchange decides how long it should last and
whether it should be synchronous (a meeting or a huddle) or asynchronous
(a message or a post). The recipient of, say, an email, a Slack
message, or a text decides whether to respond immediately, down the
road, or never. These individual behaviors together make up an anatomy of collaboration
similar to an anthill or a beehive. It is generated organically as
people work and is shaped by the beliefs, assumptions, values, and ways
of thinking that define the organization’s culture.
Olalekan Jeyifous
Architecture
is easy to observe—you just look at blueprints, models, technology, or
the space around you. Until recently the anatomy of collaboration was
hard to observe. But technology has made it possible to detect and
analyze the flows of communication.
Sensors
are all the rage. Sensors in chairs measure how long workers are at
their desks. Sensors in the floor measure when and how they move.
Sensors in RFID badges and smartphones track where they go. Sensors (in
the form of video cameras) track whom they are with. Panasonic has added
WiFi sensors to lighting systems, which can monitor face-to-face
interactions across entire buildings and workplaces.
When the firms switched to open offices, face-to-face interactions fell by 70%.
Another
way to detect interactions is by collecting the digital “breadcrumbs”
people leave when they book a meeting, send an email, open a browser
window, post on Slack or Teams, or make a call, thanks to systems
designed to save communication metadata. Increasingly, employers can use
advanced analytics tools to study that data to understand employees’
collective behaviors. Algorithms that assess workers’ movements and
interactions can learn to distinguish collaboration from mere
copresence. Ones that analyze workers’ past behaviors can learn to
predict their next moves, individually and collectively, and estimate
the probability of a valuable collision between people.
These
advances have allowed us to confirm something many people have
suspected: Collaboration’s architecture and anatomy are not lining up.
Using advanced wearables and capturing data on all electronic
interactions, we—along with Stephen Turban, one of Ethan’s former
students, who is currently at Fulbright University Vietnam—tracked
face-to-face and digital interactions at the headquarters of two Fortune
500 firms before and after the companies transitioned from cubicles to
open offices. We chose the most representative workplaces we could find;
we waited until people had settled in to their new spaces to track
their postmove interactions; and, for accuracy, we varied the length of
time over which we tracked them. With the first company, we collected
data for three weeks before the redesign, starting one month prior, and
for three weeks roughly two months after it. With the second, we
collected data for eight weeks before the redesign, starting three
months prior, and for eight weeks roughly two months after it. We
aligned our data-collection periods with seasonal business cycles for
apples-to-apples comparisons—for example, we collected data during the
same weeks of the quarter. We found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly 70% after the firms transitioned to open offices, while electronic interactions increased to compensate.
Why
did that happen? The work of the 18th-century French philosopher Denis
Diderot suggests an answer. He wrote that performers should “imagine a
huge wall across the front of the stage, separating you from the
audience, and behave exactly as if the curtain had never risen.” He
called this the fourth wall.
It prevents actors from being distracted by the audience and allows
them to divorce themselves from what they cannot control (the audience)
and focus only on what they can (the scene), much as a basketball player
shoots the ball without really seeing the cheering (or booing) fans
behind the hoop. It creates the intimacy of what some call public
solitude. The larger the audience, the more important the fourth wall.
People
in open offices create a fourth wall, and their colleagues come to
respect it. If someone is working intently, people don’t interrupt her.
If someone starts a conversation and a colleague shoots him a look of
annoyance, he won’t do it again. Especially in open spaces, fourth-wall
norms spread quickly.
Proximity Matters
A
separate finding of our and others’ research is that team members’
location has a big impact on both their physical and their digital
interactions. In general, the farther apart people are, the less they
communicate. Research
that one of us (Ben) was involved in at the MIT Media Lab shows that
the probability that any two people on a corporate campus will interact
physically or digitally is directly proportional to the distance between
their desks. More broadly, one of the most robust findings in
sociology—proposed long before we had the technology to prove it through
data—is that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction.
Consider
a study conducted at the headquarters of a major consumer products
company by Humanyze, an organizational analytics software firm headed by
one of us (Ben) that helps companies understand how their teams
interact. It found that people on the same team were six times as likely
to interact if they were on the same floor, and people on different
teams were nine times as likely to interact if they were on the same
floor. A study we conducted at the main campus of a Fortune
500 retailer with more than a dozen buildings showed that just 10% of
all communications occurred between employees whose desks were more than
500 meters apart. These findings suggest that locating people in
proximate buildings won’t improve collaboration; to increase
interactions, workers should be in the same building, ideally on the
same floor.
And
remote work, while undeniably cost-effective, tends to significantly
inhibit collaboration even over digital channels. While studying a major
technology company from 2008 to 2012, we found that remote workers
communicated nearly 80% less about their assignments than colocated team
members did; in 17% of projects they didn’t communicate at all. The
obvious implication: If team members need to interact to achieve project
milestones on time, you don’t want them working remotely.
Nourish an Anatomy of Collaboration
Since
publishing academic articles on the offices we’ve studied, we have been
asked for more details about those spaces. Some people seem to believe
that a better blueprint could solve the collaboration conundrum.
Architects, property managers, and manufacturers of office systems
reinforce that view by using data from employee surveys and prior space
utilization to identify individual needs and building “flexible,”
“agile,” “activity based” spaces to allow workers to craft their own
spaces to suit them. But collaboration is a team sport. Offices that are
overly focused on supporting individual preferences are unlikely to do
an optimal job of supporting the overall team or the collection of teams
that need to work together. So hybrid open-office designs are not a
panacea. If you are going to let people choose the spaces that best meet
their individual needs, your workers might as well be remote.
Leaders
need to make the call about what collective behaviors should be
encouraged or discouraged and how. Their means should include not just
the design of workspace configurations and technologies but the design
of tasks, roles, and culture as well.
If
keeping real estate costs in check is the priority, leaders should be
honest about that with themselves and their employees. Most office
redesigns aren’t undertaken to promote collaboration. They start with
objectives like the one described by the head of real estate at a Fortune
50 company: “The leadership team has just given me a mandate to restack
our headquarters to fit another 1,000 employees in here.” Tremendous
progress has been made designing offices that can accommodate more
people in a given space.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing: Companies often reinvest the
resulting savings in important ways.
A Return to Tight Quarters
During
much of the 1990s, organizations hired employees faster than they
expanded their offices. With layoffs in the early 2000s recession, and
again in 2008, surviving workers regained some space, largely because
companies held long-term leases and were loath to invest in office
reconfigurations. But as hiring rebounded, leases came due, and redesign
budgets recovered, organizations again began fitting their people into
smaller and smaller spaces.
If
the aim really is to boost collaboration, you need to increase the
right kinds of interactions and decrease ineffective ones. You’ll have
to carefully choose your trade-offs. That means you need to understand
current patterns of interaction and consider how you want to change
them. Using sensors and digital data to track interactions at a large
German bank, MIT researchers found
that in cases where intrateam cohesion was more predictive of
productivity and worker satisfaction than cross-team collisions were,
increasing interactions between teams undermined performance. So they
moved teams into separate rooms. And after using Humanyze technology to
track interactions, a major energy company decided to increase
communication between departments that had strong process dependencies
and reduce communication between other departments by colocating some in
a new building and moving others offsite.
If
people need uninterrupted time to focus, distractions are costly. When
that’s the case, creating more opportunities for collaboration can
amplify the cost without providing a corresponding benefit.
Conduct Real Experiments
The
best way to find the optimal workplace design for particular groups is
to run rigorous experiments. That means collecting and analyzing data on
interactions, developing a hypothesis about how to improve them, and
testing your hypothesis against a control group. Mori Building, one of
the largest property-management companies in Japan, did this in early
2016 when it sought to create more-productive collaboration among the
teams in its corporate headquarters. The office architecture was open,
but by using wearable sensors (some of which were supplied by Humanyze)
to track face-to-face interactions, Mori discovered that employees
largely communicated only with those on their own team. People generally
stayed in their team’s reserved seating area and rarely ventured into
the open seating areas—which accounted for some 20% of the space.
So
Mori’s building-environment-development division staged an experiment
to see whether it could influence anatomy with architecture. It chose a
corporate floor on which seating was arranged by team (interior design,
real estate consulting, sales, and so on). Part of the space remained
the same (the control group), and part was turned into “free address”
space—open seating, with no desk assignments. When Mori measured
face-to-face interactions in that configuration, the results were clear:
Although interactions between teams increased, those within teams fell
drastically, with people spending 1.26 times as much of their day
working in isolation.
Mori
was initially pleased with the results. The rise in cross-team
interactions meant that people were going directly to others to resolve
issues and get things done—bypassing managers, whom the data had
revealed to be “communication bottlenecks.” And although this was an
unintended consequence, the reason people spent more time on solo work
was that meetings lasting 30 minutes or longer diminished (people just
found one another when they needed to talk). But there was a dark side:
It turned out that managers were not only communication bottlenecks but
also gatekeepers of quality. In bypassing them, workers caused problems
downstream; within six months, productivity had dropped and client
complaints had risen. And although the reduction in meeting time seemed
beneficial, in retrospect it seemed that those who gained more solo work
time would have produced better work, more efficiently, if they had
attended more meetings to receive guidance, while employees who had
relied on meetings to ensure an orderly way of dealing with issues now
felt burdened by people coming to them on a whim (until they began
hiding out in the coffee shop downstairs). In the end, Mori went back to
fixed seating by team and reduced the amount of open space.
About the art: Visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous describes these
drawings, from a series titled “Political Impermanence of Place,” as
“whimsical inquiries about development and urban planning, connectivity
and organization, and economics and politics.”
By
conducting similar experiments, a major software company discovered
that 90% of face-to-face interactions took place at people’s desks. Just
3% occurred in common areas (the rest took place in meeting rooms). The
company had been planning to move to free-address seating to increase
interactions among teams, but it realized that would be highly
disruptive to collaboration and abandoned the plan.
Such
experiments require time and money, but many organizations find the
costs trivial in view of the benefits generated by what they learn.
Obviously, it pays to experiment with designs if a company is intending
an overhaul to its space like the one GlaxoSmithKline (a Humanyze
client) is planning at its corporate headquarters in London. Executives
were considering a new office format and decided to build one small
portion of it as a pilot, which they call their workplace performance
hub. The firm invited academic partners in architecture and behavioral
science to help design experiments in the space. It will soon have
rotated two teams through the pilot space—one did so during the first
nine months of 2019, and a second is being planned as we write
this—tracking (relative to a control group) measurements that include
steps, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, lung function,
posture, well-being, collaboration, and performance (using everything
from wearable devices and Kinect sensors to surveys and traditional
performance-management systems). GSK is drawing on this data to tweak
all aspects of the space—lighting, temperature, aroma, air quality,
acoustic masking, ergonomics, and design—to help its people do (and
interact) more by making the space respond to employees’ needs, whether
professional or physiological.
A
major U.S. financial institution tested dozens of floor designs at
various regional offices. It chose the one that created the
collaboration and focused-work patterns that best matched its goals and
rolled it out across the organization. The cost was not trivial; it
amounted to millions of dollars. But the firm was far better off than if
it had picked a design without running experiments and subsequently
discovered that it had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on an
ineffective configuration.
Just
as high-frequency A/B testing is common in marketing and sales, rapid
experimentation is key to workplace design. Before it adopted that
approach, a major energy company spent seven years and approximately $10
million in design and consulting fees to plan a new office building.
Today it can roll out a new plan in six months for about
$500,000—quantifying the behaviors it wants to encourage, building out
one floor of an existing office as a test, and confirming or disproving
its hypothesis that the design will prompt those behaviors. That sounds
impressive, but keep in mind that you need to experiment long enough to
understand all the dynamics in play. As Mori discovered, initial results
can be misleading.
When
conducting such experiments, you need to consider the privacy
implications of collecting the necessary data. Email and especially
sensor metadata is sensitive. In addition to questions about the
legality of amassing such information, which depends on local laws and
regulations, there are ethical concerns. Companies should be transparent
about what data they are collecting and sensitive to employees’
feelings about who owns it—the employee, who provides the raw inputs
through his or her interactions, or the organization, which gathers,
organizes, processes, and stores those inputs. Companies that ignore or
downplay those concerns risk alienating workers and incurring
significant reputational damage (see “The Happy Tracked Employee”
on HBR.org). Those that transparently demonstrate that their use of the
data is limited and is intended to benefit workers may find room for
open collaboration with employees to create even better workplace
designs.
Less Can Be More
Optimizing
collaboration doesn’t have to entail a radical overhaul of office
space; tweaks can make a difference, and it pays to test their potential
impact. Mori is now collecting data about what size the tables in its
corporate headquarters should be. Its initial conclusion: Large tables,
prescribed by many new office designs in place of individual desks, are
about as good at fostering intimate conversations as expansive
dining-room tables are—in other words, not good at all. A manufacturing
company found that small changes to furniture can have a big impact. Its
headquarters had two types of meeting spaces in the main work areas:
ones that were totally open and ones with movable whiteboard barriers on
two sides. Over 50% more interactions occurred in the whiteboard areas.
Adding more whiteboards was a trivial expense.
Sometimes
the best answer doesn’t involve changes to the physical structure.
Experiments showed Mori that events deliberately designed to achieve
particular interactions between specific individuals and teams had a
more precise and valuable impact on interaction patterns than did
changes to the office space. Those events can be internal workshops,
hackathons, or even barbecues, as long as interactions are measured,
using sensors, to show whether the desired patterns emerged. To help
integrate new hires during their first week on the job, a midsize
technology company puts jars of cookies on their desks and posts a map
in the lobby showing the jars’ locations, to encourage people to stop
by. Humanyze discovered that the location of its coffee machines
significantly influences interactions. If a team needs to focus
internally, the company puts a coffee machine in the center of its area.
If two teams need to collaborate, it puts the machine between them.
These
“software” approaches to architecture can do a lot at a very low price.
All that’s needed is a little more collaboration among real estate
professionals, HR, and the users of the space. Organizations that get
this right typically have a single executive—say, the chief human
resources officer or the chief administrative officer—overseeing both HR
and real estate.
CONCLUSION
A
single best physical or digital workspace architecture will never be
found. That’s because more interaction is not necessarily better, nor is
less. The goal should be to get the right people interacting with the
right richness at the right times.
Many
common assumptions about office architecture and collaboration are
outdated or wrong. Although the open-office design is intended to
encourage us to interact face-to-face, it gives us permission not to.
The “accidental collisions” facilitated by open offices and free spaces
can be counterproductive. In many instances, “copresence” via an open
office or a digital channel does not result in productive collaboration.
Technological
advances allow us to test assumptions and understand how groups of
workers really interact. The hard data required to prove or disprove
theories can be obtained and analyzed. For that to occur on a large
scale, the HR, real estate, and finance functions need to embrace the
experimentation that has infused marketing and operations. When that
happens, physical and virtual workplace design can become a continuous
process—one that gives the architecture and the anatomy of collaboration
a happy place to meet.
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